Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies

JEMCS 4.1 (Spring/Summer 2004) Betsy Thoughtless and the Persistence of Coquettish Volition Helen Thompson 1. Breaking Betsy: Haywood's Astellian Plot In On the Citizen (1647), Thomas Hobbes makes the seem ingly redundant distinction: "The will, it is true, is not vol untary, but only the starting point of voluntary actions (for we do not will to will but to act)99 (73). With this attribution of the agency of volition to every "act except willing itself, Hobbes makes an exception that John Locke exploits to novel political ends. By agreeing that "Man in respect to that act of willing, is under a necessity, and so cannot be free," Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) derives from "necessity" a refined articulation of freedom (245). This articulation of freedom proceeds from Locke's equation of the activity ofwilling and the activity, he repeat edly states, of choosing; the identity of willing and being "better pleased with one thing [more] than another" defines the Lockean cognate of Hobbes's claim as "it is unavoidably necessary to prefer" (248, 243). The likeness of willing and preferring characterizes the "Man" ofwhom Locke writes in terms of a persistently mech anistic, or passion-driven, philosophy of the person. This becomes clear in the basic distinction that Locke imposes upon the objects of necessarily willing men's desire: [I]nmost cases a Man is not at Liberty to forbear the act of volition; he must exert an act of his will, whereby the action proposed, ismade to exist, or not to exist. But yet Thompson 103 there is a case wherein a Man is at Liberty in respect of willing, and that is the chusing of a remote Good as an end to be pursued. Here a Man may suspend the act of his choice from being determined for or against the thing proposed, till he has examined, whether it be really of a nature in it self and consequences to make him happy, or no. (270) To reconstitute "all the liberty Men have," Locke accom modates a physiology reflexively swayed by "present Pleasure" to the promise of a "remote Good" that cannot be felt by the mechanistic sensorium (267, 276). The opposition of palpable and remote good defines the liberty of, for exam ple, a drinking man as his ability to distinguish what is good ("the joys of another life") from what merely feels good ("the idle chat of a soaking Club") (253); this man's liberty resides not in his power to get what he wants, but in his power to "suspend the act of his choice" until he wants a happiness lacking the sensory appeal of the other "thing proposed." Locke's redefinition of "the foundation of our liberty" as the power "to hold our wills undetermined" (266, 267) permits his Second Treatise (1690) to advance its reciprocal redefin ition, not of liberty, but of the law. Here Locke again shows his debt to Hobbes, whose Leviathan (1651) deduces law's utility from the mechanical body's infelicities: laws protect persons from "their own impetuous desires, rashness, or indiscretion, as hedges are set, not to stop travellers [sic], but to keep them in the way" (259).1 Locke's Second Treatise repeats: "For Law, in its true Notion, is not so much the Limitation as the direction of a free and intelligent Agent to his proper Interest. . . . [TJhat ill deserves the Name of Confinement which hedges us in only from Bogs and Precipices" (305). By "suspending] the present satisfaction of any desire" until he determines what materiality of happiness "really" pleases him, Locke's intelligent agent reduces the law to a "hedge" guarding him from what he will not want in any case (Essay 267). With this specification of the law as a sanction superfluous to men whose "feeble passionate Nature" no longer impedes their practice of a "Morality, [which] estab lished upon its true Foundations, cannot but determine the 104 The Journal for Early Modem Cultural Studies Choice in any one, that will but consider" (Essay 278, 281)2, we can begin to appreciate the fault of the coquette repre sented by Eliza Haywood's novel The History...